“Solidarity” vs “Charity” in the Social Doctrine of the Church

A long time ago, I bought, and read (or “read”) the document known as the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, which is pretty much what it says on the tin.

One quick-and-dirty thing I did at the time was to go to the book’s index and compare the mentions of the word “solidarity” versus the word “charity.” If memory serves, the ratio is something like 3-to-1 in favor of “solidarity.”

My first reaction was to think that this is a big mistake.

“Solidarity” is fine, but it’s not, properly speaking, Christian. Solidarity says: “We’re all in this together, and so if we help each other out, we’re all going to come out ahead.” That’s great, but it’s natural law, not divine law.

Charity, caritas, by contrast, is properly divine love. The Good Samaritan acted out of charity, not solidarity. When Jesus says: “You have heard it said: love your friends and hate your enemies, but I say to you love your enemies”, the former is solidarity, but the latter is charity.

Solidarity says help your neighbor because it’s in your long-term self-interest; charity says help your neighbor even when it’s against your self-interest.

And so my thinking was that if we’re going to do a properly Catholic social doctrine, shouldn’t that ratio, then, be reversed? Shouldn’t we Christians talk a lot more about charity than about solidarity?

But after reflecting on this for a while, I came to see the profound wisdom of this decision, which stems from the fact that we live in a fallen world.

Because, after all, in the words of Blaise Pascal, man is neither angel nor beast, but he who would turn him into an angel turns him into a beast.

Christian morality demands saintly charity of every individual soul, but if we are doing social doctrine we cannot simply expect that everyone will be a saint, because that would be utopianism, and utopianism always ends in disaster, because we live in a fallen world.

In particular, what distinguishes solidarity from charity is the idea of reciprocity. Social doctrine does not happen in a vacuum, but rather, as the name suggests, relates to society. And in a given society, solidarity is only made possible when there is reciprocity; that is to say, when solidarity comes with expectations of some sort of reciprocation; the social sense of justice and fairness is scandalized when there is a belief that we’re giving “something for nothing.” And so social doctrines that do not promote solidarity and reciprocity end up sawing off the branch they are sitting on because they undermine that which makes them possible.

Now, this does not mean–far from it–that we should give up on the ideal of charity, even at the social level. We must always strain against the bounds of sin. But, as I said, I now recognize the profound wisdom of giving solidarity prominence in formulations of social doctrine.